Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Reinforcements. He knows he isn’t invulnerable. He killed too many vampires himself to think that. No matter how tough he may be, there’s going to come a time when he just won’t be strong enough. When somebody is going to get him. I don’t think he’s all that worried about me. I’m just one person and he knows all my best tricks—because he taught them to me. Individually, nobody is tough enough to be a serious threat. But he’s smart, and he knows he’s outnumbered. If I can’t stop him, eventually he’ll be up against more than just me. If he wants to keep drinking blood—and he can’t stop now—he knows we’ll fight him over every drop. If he creates new vampires they can fight by his side.”

  “So he’s a Vampire Zero now. Just like you warned about.”

  She nodded. “At least he’s trying to become one. Angus and Astarte both turned him down.”

  “You think he’ll try the same offer with someone else,” Fetlock offered.

  “Yeah. I think he’s going to approach everybody he supposedly loved when he was alive. Jameson Arkeley was a lot of things, but a good family man was not one of them. He got as far as he could from his brother and then never looked back—they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. He cheated on and nearly deserted his wife. His kids barely knew him. His kids—”

  “—are next on the list,” Fetlock finished. “Jesus.” He pressed his fingers against his temples and then ran them down his cheeks. “There are two of them, right? Raleigh, and Sam?”

  “Simon,” Caxton corrected. “He’s twenty, she’s nineteen. Way too young to die. I don’t know which of them he’ll approach first, but I already have an appointment to talk to Raleigh tomorrow. She lives outside of Allentown. That’s up in coal country, near where I grew up, actually. It’s an area I know well, so it’s a good place to make a stand. If I can be there when Jameson arrives, I can set up an ambush and maybe that’s all it takes. As for Simon, I don’t know. I tried to talk to him recently, but he was adversarial to say the least. He won’t want to cooperate. He’s farther away, too. He’s a student up at Syracuse.”

  “You’re not limited by state jurisdiction, now that you’re a Fed,” Fetlock said. “I can send some deputies up there to scoop him up. Put him in protective custody. The Marshals Service has all kinds of safe houses we can use. We administer the Witness Protection Program—we can definitely put the kid up for a couple of days.”

  “But not against his will. Like I said, he’s not going to cooperate. Not happily.”

  “No. But if we can convince him his life is really in danger, why would he refuse? How sure are you about this, about him going after his kids?”

  “Ninety percent. On the phone he told me to stay away from his family. I think that’s a pretty clear indication of—”

  “Excuse me?” Fetlock took a step toward her and leaned in close, as if he wanted to hear her better. “Did you just say you spoke with Jameson Arkeley on the phone?”

  There was no point in denying it. “Yeah. Earlier, he procured a cell phone from the lead unit in the assault here. I called that number hoping to speak with the trooper in charge, but that man was already dead. Jameson answered in his place, and tried to warn me off. It’ll all go in my report, I swear.”

  Fetlock straightened up and scratched under his nose. “That’s—that’s interesting.”

  She bit her lip. “I’ve…heard from Malvern, too. Via text message.”

  Fetlock went a little pale.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m going to get you a new phone. We’ll just switch out the SIM card, so you can keep the same number. But the phone I give you will let you record incoming calls. It’ll also allow me to listen in. If he calls you again, we’ll at least have a copy of anything he says.”

  Caxton frowned. “I’m not sure I’m all that comfortable with you listening to my calls. That’s kind of intrusive, don’t you think?”

  “Part of the job. Besides, it’s not like you’re using your phone for personal calls. It’s just a work phone, right? The government pays for those minutes, so they belong to the taxpayers, not you.”

  Caxton forced herself to smile. “Alright, Deputy Marshal.”

  “Looks like you have your work cut out for you. Tomorrow you can start securing the kids. What about tonight, though? Is Arkeley going to strike again, somewhere else?”

  Caxton shrugged. She thought about what Vesta Polder had said—about Jameson sulking in his lair. There was a better reason to believe he was done for the night, however. “Probably not. He’s fed enough to keep him full for a while, and he hasn’t reached the point yet where he’s killing for fun. Thank God.”

  Fetlock nodded in agreement. “I want to know everything that happened here tonight. But I can see you’re exhausted. Get out of here and get some sleep. You can write up everything in your incident report and get it to me tomorrow.” With that he took his leave, taking Vesta Polder with him.

  The chief of the Bellefonte Police Department showed up shortly thereafter. She shook his hand and gave him a very quick idea of what had happened. She didn’t want to go into the gory details—his own people could tell him about those. Having officially turned the scene over to him, she found herself more than ready to leave.

  She found Glauer still going from door to door, telling Astarte’s neighbors there was nothing to worry about. She called him back down to the street and told him it was time to go home. “I’ll drive you back to HQ. We should both be in bed before midnight—there’s going to be a lot to do tomorrow.”

  He didn’t say a word. She led him back to her car, but he just stood there, staring up at Astarte’s house. A number of lights had been turned on inside and the front door stood wide open. Caxton could see local cops inside bent over the bodies of the three half-deads in the foyer. Flashes of light told her they’d brought a photographer to document the scene, which made her think of Clara. Clara, who would be waiting for her at home. Maybe there would even be hot food there for her.

  “Come on, Glauer, I’m tired,” she said.

  The big cop turned and looked at her with haunted eyes. He made no move to get into the car.

  She knew what was under his skin. “It was us or them,” she said.

  “They were police officers.”

  “They were half-deads,” she said. “They weren’t themselves anymore.”

  “They were police officers before they were half-deads,” he replied. “You sent them here. You sent them here knowing he was going to kill them.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” she insisted. “I sent them here knowing there was a chance they could get killed. Also knowing that was part of their job. Policemen put themselves in the line of danger all the time. It’s what they sign up for. It’s what we signed up for.”

  He shook his head. “Sure,” he said, “cops go up against bad guys all the time and sometimes, occasionally, one of them gets shot. Sometimes one even gets killed. This was something more, something worse. I’m not necessarily blaming you for their deaths. But the bodies are starting to pile up real high.”

  “That’s why we’re doing this, to keep Jameson from killing any more.”

  “Really?” Glauer asked.

  “Yeah, damn it!” Caxton scowled at the big cop. “Yeah. Everything I do. Every day of my life since October has been devoted to that. I put my own life at risk every night, and I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. I have to make hard decisions sometimes. I have to make them fast. Sometimes I make the wrong choice.”

  “Tonight was one of those times. I’m just saying—”

  “I’ve said all I’m going to. Get in the car before I freeze my ass off.”

  “You need to be more careful with the people around you. Maybe you don’t care if you live or die, but the families of those men are—”

  “Get in the damned car!”

  “Yes, Deputy,” he growled, and yanked the passenger door open.

  “It’s Special Deputy,” she shot back, and climbed in her own s
ide.

  She drove him back to Harrisburg without saying another word. When they arrived he jumped out and ran inside the building without even looking at her.

  24.

  In the morning Caxton woke to pure white light streaming in through her window. It had snowed so much during the night that it had piled up against the windowpane. She couldn’t even see the backyard.

  She could smell bacon and eggs cooking in the kitchen. Reluctantly she kicked off the electric blanket and went to the table in her pajamas. Clara beamed at her from the stove. “The way you looked when you came in last night, I figured you could use a hot meal.”

  Caxton tried to smile back, but her face didn’t quite feel up to it. When Clara put a cup of coffee in front of her she sipped at it, grateful but unable to say so. She wanted to tell Clara everything that had happened. She wanted to just grab her around the legs and hug her. She couldn’t do that either.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Clara said, when she had finished making her omelets and had placed them on the table. “About what you said yesterday. Obviously I can’t be your forensics specialist. But maybe I could do what you said. You know, coordinate with those guys. I could come work with you. If that would be helpful.”

  Laura’s eyes went wide. “It would.”

  Clara nodded and started to eat. “You can buy me lunch every day, too. If you want.”

  “I do,” Laura replied.

  “Where should we go today, then?”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah?”

  “There’s only one problem,” Caxton said. “Today I’m going out to Allentown. To talk to Jameson’s daughter, Raleigh. And I’ll probably have to spend the night there, too.”

  “Of course,” Clara said, and turned back to the stove.

  “Hey,” Laura said, as soothingly as she could, “you’ve been great about this so far. I know I have no right to ask for more understanding, but I need it.”

  “Yeah,” Clara said. “Yeah, of course it’s okay. I suppose she’s in mortal danger, this girl.”

  “Her own father is going to try to kill her.”

  Clara turned around with a sad smile on her face. “I can’t compete with that. Go. Do what you do best. I’ll be here when you get home.”

  Laura kissed her. She ate her eggs and bacon, though she was too distracted to taste anything, and then she went to get dressed. In half an hour she was on the road, headed for her office. There were errands to complete there. She had to write her report on the previous night’s disaster, for one thing. She found her new phone waiting on her desk, still in its box—Fetlock must have delivered it during the night. The Fed travels fast, she thought. It was bigger and clunkier than her old one, with a tiny black-and-white screen. Sighing with pointless misgivings, she slipped the SIM card out of her old phone and into the new beast and then shoved it in her pocket. It started to ring almost instantly. It was Fetlock calling.

  “You’re going to watch Raleigh?” Fetlock asked, once she’d said hello. “Good. Don’t let me stop you. I saw that you had activated the new phone, so I thought I’d test it out for you.”

  “It seems to work fine,” she said.

  “Yes, on this end too. Listen, I’ve just sent you an email—take a look now. I’ll wait.” While Caxton booted up her computer he explained, “I’ve had my best people working on the videotapes from our archives facility. I thought we might catch our intruder in the act. It looks like we might have something.”

  Caxton opened her email and saw a picture start to load. “This is the guy who broke in and stole all of Jameson’s files?”

  “I believe so, yes,” Fetlock confirmed. “We only caught him for a split second, but my digital analysis people cleaned up the image quite a bit. I thought you should see this.”

  The picture on the screen showed a man in a light blue suit walking through a metal detector. The shot was blurry at best, and the face couldn’t be seen at all—just the back of the man’s head. His hair could have been brown or black—the image was too poorly lit to be sure. “He was using Jameson’s ID, right? It’s not him, though.”

  “You don’t think it could have been the vampire in disguise?” Fetlock asked.

  Caxton frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Vampires do alter their appearance sometimes. They put on wigs, throw on some makeup. I knew one, once, who tore off the tips of his own ears so they’d look more human.” She tapped at the screen of her computer. “This is different, though. Those vampires wouldn’t fool anybody except from at an extreme distance. It would take Hollywood-level makeup artists to make one look this human. No, I still think this is a human being pretending to be Jameson. He found someone human and sent him in his place. Besides. He’s got all his fingers. Jameson is missing all the fingers from one hand.”

  “He could be wearing a prosthesis,” Fetlock suggested.

  Caxton frowned at her screen. “A guy walks into your offices, wearing powder on his face, an obvious wig, and a fake hand. Even if the makeup job was good, don’t you think somebody would notice something?”

  “So it definitely wasn’t Jameson. Which only begs more questions,” Fetlock said.

  “Yeah. Now, if it’s alright, I have to get going—time’s wasting,” Caxton said. She didn’t particularly care about the archives theft. She was far more worried about losing another one of Jameson’s family members.

  She wasn’t quite done, though. Before she left she stuck her head into the briefing room. She hoped to find Glauer there. She planned to apologize to him. It had been a bad night for everybody, but he hadn’t deserved the crap she’d given him. She found him just where she’d expected, and he’d been busy.

  He had taken the liberty of updating the whiteboards. For VAMPIRE PATTERN #1 he had pasted up pictures of the Carboy family underneath the pictures of Rexroth/Carboy’s other victims. For VAMPIRE PATTERN #1 he had found pictures of the state troopers and Bellefonte police they’d fought at Astarte’s house, as well as the anonymous half-dead from the motel where Angus died. Jameson’s brother and his widow both had their own memorials there, circled in red marker. The boards were getting crowded; there wasn’t much room left for future victims.

  It was fine that he’d done all that—but when she saw what else he’d done she nearly lost it. He had taken one of Dylan Carboy’s notebooks—the one that had been gummed together with dried blood—and separated all the pages. They lay spread out on the desks like an enormous tarot card reading.

  She had given him specific instructions to stop reading the notebooks. Clearly he’d decided he didn’t have to obey her orders. Before she could blow up at him, though, he held up his hands. “I can explain,” he said. “I know you think this is all garbage. And the vast majority of it definitely is. There are whole sections where he just copied down the lyrics of his favorite songs, and there are pages where he pasted in printouts of websites, some of them pretty random. It looks like he was obsessed with the Columbine school shooting for a while. I think maybe he was planning something similar at his college—that might have been when he bought the shotgun.”

  He tapped one of the desks. “But starting here things change. None of his journal entries are dated, but he talks about a TV show he watched and I looked it up. The episode he mentions ran the first week in October.”

  “Right after Jameson accepted the curse,” Caxton suggested.

  “Yeah.” Glauer picked up one of the sheets. “The show’s not important except that it gives us a time frame for the transition. Before that date most of his entries are long, rambling passages about how he feels like no one understands him and how he feels alienated even from his family. Then we have this one. It stuck out at first only because it was so short: ‘I saw him outside my window tonight. He’s close now, and coming closer.’”

  Caxton raised an eyebrow.

  Glauer pushed his way between the desks, knocking them sideways in his excitement so their feet squeaked across the linoleum. “There’s more! Here, mayb
e a couple days later: ‘He told me the strong will always prey on the weak. That’s the laws of nature. He said if you were weak you had a duty to make yourself stronger, or to get out of the way. Nobody is as strong as him.’”

  “Does he ever mention Jameson by name?” Caxton asked.

  Glauer dropped his head. “No. At least not in the journal entries. There are newspaper articles about vampires all over this notebook. A lot of them about what happened at Gettysburg.”

  Caxton leaned against the bookcase. “But you think this ‘he’ is Jameson. You think he was in contact with Carboy somehow. Presumably not through their MySpace pages.”

  “We know they can communicate telepathically,” Glauer tried.

  Caxton couldn’t deny it—she’d had her mind invaded by more vampires than she liked to remember.

  “And after the second week in October he starts talking about a ‘she’ as well. Here: ‘She was beautiful once, and can be again. It would be an honor to feed her, to make her whole. It would be an act of love.’”

  “So he was talking to Malvern, too. Okay. And this kid sounds about the right type to get a vampire’s interest. He was fucked up already, spiraling toward violence, ready to obliterate himself as long as he could take some other people with him. That would make him a perfect candidate to accept the curse.”

  “Yeah,” Glauer said.

  “But in the end they didn’t give it to him. He had to pretend he was a vampire. We know Jameson is recruiting. We know Malvern has recruited in the past, and I have no doubt she wants more vampires to come worship her. Neither of them gave Carboy what he wanted. That suggests to me he never met either of them face-to-face. Maybe he just imagined these conversations. Maybe he was just crazy.”

  “Maybe, but there’s something here. Something…I need to read more.”

  Caxton threw up her arms. “Alright. I don’t need you right now, actually. I’m going out to Allentown, to Raleigh’s place, but they don’t let men in there, you said. So spend the day on this if you need to. One day.”